The Ridgeway, July 16 Day 4, 21 miles
The Ridgeway, July 16 Day 4, 21 miles The early morning walk out of Wallingford was one of the best I’ve ever taken. No longer on the ridge, the path simply winds its way between wheat fields and pastures, but it is shaded by huge old beech trees. In places it drops down into old […]
Walking to Cape Wrath, Day 27, June 6, 2022
Walking to Cape Wrath, Day 27, June 6, 2022 A zero day (did not walk except from the campground to the service station/ cafe then to the Kinlochewe hotel). Had breakfast at the cafe run by wonderful people with a nice set-up and great sausage and bacon buns. As usual with people in this country, […]
Walking to Cape Wrath, Day 13, May 23, 2022
Walking to Cape Wrath, Day 13, May 23, 2022 A typical day hiking New Zealand’s Te Araroa on the South Island is rising in the morning to hike alongside a river, heading upstream so the path continually rises as the river diminishes. Usually by around noon, the trail crosses a saddle, and you can look […]
Mediating a Mountain
Mediating a Mountain—some thoughts on Nan Shepherd and Elise Wortley After some years of exploring nature writing through actual material practices (e.g., that time we framed up Thoreau’s house using only the tools he could have used “Building Thoreau’s House”), I was gratified to read Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways where he encountered Edward Thomas’s […]
A Conspiracy of Trees
A Conspiracy of Trees I want to revisit a forest walk— maybe this one near Lake St. Clair in Tasmania (the trek that prompts this essay) or ridge-top nothofagus in New Zealand’s Tararuas, or the old, twisted orchards that surrounded my boyhood home— to think about empiricism, specifically “radical empiricism,” and the problem of representation […]
June 29
June 29 The first part of MacFarlane’s The Old Ways describes some fairly traditional (if sometimes dangerous) walks, while the second takes to the seas, noting the similarities between navigating the old sea ways and walking old paths, but that part also includes a chapter on crossing Lewis island on a path through peat and […]
Walkers Have Never Been Modern
Walkers Have Never Been Modern for Bruno Latour Robert MacFarlane along with Stanley Donwood and Dan Richards wrote a beautiful little book called Holloway. A holloway is “a sunken path, a deep & shady lane. A route that centuries of foot-fall, hoof-hit, wheel-roll, & rain-run have harrowed into the land.” In other words, a holloway […]
May 8
May 8 Gonzalez to Boente 37 km. Robert MacFarlane along with Stanley Donwood and Dan Richards wrote a beautiful little book called Holloway. A holloway is “a sunken path, a deep & shady lane. A route that centuries of foot-fall, hoof-hit, wheel-roll, & rain-run have harrowed into the land.” They trace and illustrate a number […]